With all the tutorials that have been posted on this site demonstrating how to use different iOS game engines to create games a new user may think that these game engines are the only way to go – and everything you learned in those beginner iPhone development books like the basics of animating UIViews was completely unsuitable for gaming.

Well that’s just not true. Recently I received the submission of an excellent tutorial demonstrating how to create a board game from the ground up without the use of any libraries outside of those built into the iOS SDK – and it looks great too. No Cocos2D or Corona SDK used here.

This tutorial covers everything shown in the demo demonstrating how to place the background, setting up the game, creating the game logic, creating the animations, and saving the game state within a SQLite database.

Here’s a video of the code created with the tutorial running in the iPhone simulator:

An example project containing the code is provided with the tutorial, along with the source code for the more advanced version which is actually in the app store. The provided zip file without tutorial at the end points to the full version.

What’s really great about this tutorial is that it goes right from the beginning so you can follow along and end up with a real playable game at the end.